Continuous delivery is a software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time. It aims at building, testing, and releasing software with greater speed and frequency. The approach helps reduce the cost, time, and risk of delivering changes by allowing for more incremental updates to applications in production. A straightforward and repeatable deployment process is important for continuous delivery.
Continuous delivery is enabled through the deployment pipeline. That is, the continuous delivery pipeline enables a constant flow of changes into production via an automated software production line.
The pipeline breaks down the software delivery process into stages, such as build and test. Each stage is aimed at verifying the quality of new features from a different angle to validate the new functionality and prevent errors from affecting the software. The pipeline should provide feedback to the team and visibility into the flow of changes to everyone involved in delivering the new feature/s.
Currently, there are many layers in which a failure in the continuous delivery pipeline can occur, such as the application level, container environment, virtual host, hypervisor, storage, network, etc. Code is used in the form of various languages and application programming interfaces (APIs) that orchestrate the sequences of the continuous delivery pipelines. As projects mature, the layers of integration, orchestration code and dependencies between layers becomes more complex as quality gates (check on a code quality fact that must be enforced before releasing and committing to a source control) are introduced. The dependencies intertwined between layers of infrastructure code, application code and framework code grow more complex where changes of code at any of these levels can strongly influence the quality of the project as well as its delivery.
Modern software pipeline development environments attempt to prevent failures in the continuous delivery pipeline by controlling all actions of the pipeline sequences through code, tool frameworks enabled through API services, quality gates and monitoring frameworks. As a result, in order to attempt to limit the failures in the continuous delivery pipeline, developers utilize context switching between multiple environments, such as an integrated development environment and a text editor. Furthermore, in an attempt to limit the failures in the continuous delivery pipeline, developers are required to possess intricate knowledge of all pipeline stages, tools, APIs, architecture, historical failures and historical root cause analysis investigations, etc.
As a result, there is not currently a means for effectively limiting the failures in the continuous delivery pipeline.